Actually Doing Stuff to help Independents

All is NOT Well

ECI’s Andrew Morgan pretty much lost it over my Disaster in Dallas post. Now, he has changed the story from one of his original emails describing the incident shown below.

In Morgan’s latest story (here) I am of course uninformed by, and unconnected to, the ECI elites. I’m just mean ol’ Rick out to get the poor and defenseless ECI. This sounds familiar.

In case you forgot, this was the same excuse provided by Morgan and crew the last time I dared to criticize their pathetically transparent OPSA fraud. Rick just doesn’t understand. Rick is just a United mouthpiece. Rick does not have all the facts. Rick is a liar. Rick’s a meanie. Rick did not consult with us. Rick is not agreeing with us. And on and on. This pat-answer bravado from ECI can all be boiled down to: “We here at ECI are better and smarter than everyone else and are above all forms of criticism.”

While I may not be better or smarter than the ECI elites, I do know bullshit when I see it. The problem with these ECI spokesmodels is that they have become so encased in their own propaganda that they actually believe it themselves. So let’s have a look at what they have to say. You decide who is telling the truth.

In Morgan’s most recent story, (here) he states that a ransomware virus was detected on the DDMS hosted environment and traced back to a legitimate user.

In one of Morgan’s original stories (below), he states that “we are taking the DDMS hosted environment offline.” He goes on to tell DDMS customers, presumably all of them, that two days of orders “will likely need to be re-entered.”

One user, at one dealership, took the entireDDMS hosted environment offline resulting in the loss of two days of business. These are Morgan’s own words. Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, attempt to reconcile thesestatements with this bit of propaganda from Morgan’s latest spiel: “security and data protection is a top priority for ECI.” You can’t reconcile these two contradictory statements outside the ECI bubble. The event he so willfully describes is clearly a massive security failure caused by a catastrophic lack of priorities.

Was DDMS hacked like I said in my post? According to Morgan, yes it was. Was data compromised like I said in my post? Again, according to Morgan, yes it was.

Morgan wants to split hairs on this one issue claiming the hackers did not carry away your data so there was no data breach. But: “theft or loss of digital media” is the definition of Data Breach according to Wikipedia. In Morgan’s own words, there absolutely was a “loss of data.”

This is only what ECI is admitting so far: DDMS hosted was hacked, shutdown and there was a substantial data loss. What else happened? Who knows? We may never know. I do believe what the few dealers willing to talk about it have to say about the DDMS system. These are long time users of the DDMS system, not clueless presenters. Dealers, who by the way, are terrified of what Morgan will do to them and their businesses if he finds out they are talking to me. I have to be really careful. Morgan is obsessed with finding out who these dealers are. How dare they, after all.

This all confirms the broader point I made: “The ECI bankers only care about making money.” They don’t care about security and they don’t care about your business. You are just an asset to be stripped and flipped to the next banker in line. How many has it been now? Four or five? I lost count. A flip is due any day now, so keep that in mind.

Here is one of Morgan’s original stories regarding the incident:

Dear DDMS Customer,

We wanted to update you on the emergency maintenance being performed on the DDMS hosted environment this weekend.

As a recap of previous communications:

On Sunday we informed you that we were taking the DDMS hosted environment offline for emergency maintenance purposes. As part of our proactive monitoring procedures, ECi detected a potential security threat in one of our datacenters. ECi security and operations staff quickly responded and instituted emergency maintenance procedures to protect your data and ensure business continuity. Immediately upon discovering the potential issue, our IT staff isolated the case and at present we do not believe any dealer’s data within DDMS has been breached. ECi staff continues to work around the clock to resolve the issue.

At this point all systems have been restored and services are functioning.
If you encounter any issues with the hosted environment, please log onto the Support Portal or call Support and choose the option “Hosted”. For other inquiries, such as end-of-month or OPUS loads, please select the “DDMS” option on the Portal or when calling Support.

Due to the nature of the maintenance, orders placed on Saturday (5/28) and Sunday (5/29) will likely need to be re-entered. The ECi team will be proactively sending these reports to you to facilitate this process.

ECi is committed to supporting you and your business. We will continue to evaluate our policies, procedures and control mechanisms to ensure that your systems are safe and secure.